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The Gate was composed in the summer of 1993 for Alternate Currents, a Bay Area new music ensemble, and conceived as a gentle response to the turbulence of Earthly Prayers. The result was a single movement work that is unvaryingly quiet and spacious, and follows a slowly-evolving, purely intuitive path. Its title was inspired by a story told by a friend. One of her close acquaintances, an elderly woman, was out for her morning walk and suddenly collapsed. She was revived-somewhat against her inclination-by a passerby. Afterwards, she said she was no longer apprehensive about death, because she had seen "the gate." The music alternates between two types of instrumental relationships: one, in which everyone is coordinated horizontally through a common meter, and another, in which they float independently, each pursuing his/her own line or repeated fragment. |